04 War Clouds; The Taste of Defeat; War at Last; Internment and Discernment; Splitting the Atom; Blackpool Breezes; Prison; Division; Military Detention

War Clouds

Getting back to 1938, as it drew to a close I began to work at a North London
hospital. It was well paid for the time — hospitals have slid back since like
everything else in local government but there was great competition for such
municipal and therefore presumed secure and pensionable jobs. The nurses
themselves were less well rewarded, then as now being regarded as dedicated and
expected to put up with low pay and poor conditions. There was no possibility of
my getting into any trouble here, since the non-medical staff was unionised but
apathetic. This was a bit upsetting as I had a seeming compulsion to bash my
head on brick walls. Wages were set according to national standards, and the
non-nursing medical staff were only interested in their careers.

Even when I started talking anarchism I couldn’t shake the complacency around
me. One pompous technician assured his assistants that they need not take me
seriously as he knew my family well and was sure I would grow out of it. Over
half a century has gone by and I haven’t done so yet. But as his brother used
the same garage as my father, he felt himself an authority on my future.

Political talk, apart from my trying to stir things up, centred around the
coming war. There were one or two incredibly soppy Christian Pacifist types, it
being the last despairing days of the Peace Pledge of Dick Sheppard. Their
opinions ranged from “Well, if the country really were in danger, we could
probably be absolved from our pledge” to assertions that Mr Chamberlain, or in
some cases Jesus, was trying to do his best, which tended to arouse blasphemy,
not to say obscenity, in the majority.

Though I joined in the campaign against conscription like everyone else in
the Anarchist movement and even most on the extra-parliamentary Left (all for
differing reasons) it was self-evident the workers were not prepared to resist
it even though they were not for war. If peace-time conscription came (as it
did, a few months before the war) it would be accepted (as inflation and
unemployment were) with fatalism, almost as an act of Nature, and resistance
would be regarded as cranky.

The Peace Pledgers, along with League of Nations and World Government types,
had unwittingly ensured that, with the incredulity their ideas
provoked. Though to be sure their belief that the superior power of non-violence
would look after matters was no more nonsense than other ideas going round, such
as that we had to fight a war every 25 years for each generation to prove its
manhood, or that the Jerries hadn’t been properly taken care of last time, or
that it was because the government was spineless that we hadn’t smashed them
before. It was also sometimes whispered by a shamefaced political minority that
it was going to be a war for democracy.

The ‘old sweats’ whose opinions carried weight, comprised most of the
portering staff. The hospital had been an old workhouse, converted in 1914 and
remaining so after the war, taking on as portering staff and X-ray technicians
many who had worked their way up from patients. They gave assurances that they
‘knew’ as they had been in this or that section of the trenches in WWI, and
young men couldn’t know what it was all about until they had ‘served’ and
conscientious objectors were ‘syphilitic cowards’.

Some of these patriots were inclined to favour Hitler who had been ‘in the
trenches’ and was ‘for his own people’, while ‘our’ Prime Minister had gone to
him ‘pleading’. This might be thought a caricature, but it was not untypical.
Radical thought had got totally out of touch with the reality of working class
life. The ‘Left’, as distinct from the working class movement, had moved in to
take over the heritage of radical thought. The end of the thirties was the start
of the collapse of a long tradition of which the anarchists were once the
far-out wing and finally the last survivors. The thirties was a period of
pop-frontism which was directed at the lower middle class rather than at the
workers, who gradually withdrew from their own movement. I recall Eleanor
Rathbone, an indignant academic lady who was Independent MP for the Universities
and according to her own lights a sincere liberal, telling an embarrassed
women’s co-op guild that in German concentration camps there were distinguished
professors, poets, scientists, “people respected for their achievements all over
the world” — nobody else seemed to matter — and they were forced to scrub
floors. There was an embarrassed silence from ladies who had done this all
their lives as a matter of course rather than as a punishment, but it was no
doubt the worst thing Miss Rathbone could think of.

The marriage between ‘the Left’ — which is to say the politically conscious
‘progressive’ middle class, and especially the failed academics who saw
themselves as ‘the intellectuals’ — and the working class movement broke down
in the thirties, more especially when the ‘universities’ rallied to Communist
pop-frontism but culminating with the middle-class takeover of the Labour Party.

Though seeing the political scene clearly, and understanding anarchism well
enough to travel around to explain it in almost every town in the country,
always at my own expense, I was not yet able to see clearly what we could do
beyond the creation of affinity groups that could withstand oppression created
by war or fascism.

In Birmingham I met one affinity group that had weathered the storm, a group
of German anarchists who had originally jumped ship at Glasgow (and taken refuge
with Frank Leech) and now were forming, in the house of a sympathiser, the
‘Black and Red (Schwarzrot) Group’. They intended to launch a
counter-terror campaign in Germany and there were already some German civil
engineers working there forming an anti-Nazi nucleus.

The sailors had close connections with Hamburg but were wise enough to stay
in an inland city rather than in Glasgow, where they could more easily be
traced. Several seafarers came to this haven in Birmingham, among them Ernst
Schneider, a veteran of the Wilhelmshaven revolt, a marked man and unable to
return. Most of the others did go back. Thirty years later I met one of them in
East Berlin who told me of some attacks on the regime that had taken place, but
had ceased with the war when resisters became totally isolated, if still alive.

There was a curious sequel in Birmingham nearly forty years on (1977) when
the local and national press, apparently relying on German police information,
suggested that local anarchists were among those responsible for the kidnapping
and killing of Hans-Martin Schleyer, the employers’ leader (and former SS
officer), by the Red Army Fraction and named Peter Le Mare of Birmingham as
being connected. This caused some surprise, to put it mildly, as Peter was an
ultra-pacifist who knew nothing of Germany but did run a little magazine called
“Red and Black”. Though he had not even been born forty years before, the German
police (who had lost their records to the Americans) may have tipped off a
British journalist. There was certainly a notorious Nazi named Schleyer (hardly
that one) scheduled for attack (I don’t know whether successfully or not) by the
Black and Red Group of 1938 and named in their bulletin. The British police did
not follow up the local paper’s somewhat belated tip to uncover an anti-Nazi
plot, possibly knowing better. I dare say they would have been only too glad to
follow it up, true or false, in 1938.

The Taste of Defeat

With the defeat of the anti-fascist forces in Spain in the Spring of 1939 it
hardly seemed to many of those abroad, who had pinned so many hopes on it,
worthwhile carrying on. Though the Spanish Revolution had been lost in 1937 and
most of what followed was defence against a fascist victory, it came as a bitter disappointment.

It is still not appreciated that after his victory Franco killed more Spanish
people than Hitler killed German Jews, indeed only a fraction less than there
were Jews in Germany at all, a remnant of whom perished from war, want, age and
causes other than State murder. Hitler had the rest of Europe to choose his
victims from, making the number he killed greater, which must have made Franco
envious. Despite my own family background, the Spanish experience affected me
personally more deeply than the subsequent Nazi Holocaust, and I knew many
involved in it. It spurred me on despite the prevailing feeling of hopelessness
at the triumph of both fascism and war.

In Glasgow the anarchist movement was flourishing more than ever with its own
hall and huge open air meetings at factory gates, carrying on a tradition of
integration in the working class movement which was lost in England, where the
old movement had decayed. Such groups as there were in London, including
Spain and the World collapsed. Almost the whole working class support
in places like Wales, a minority though it was, disappeared. Cores in London
continued virtually as a one-person band, arranging for weekly ‘lectures’ from a
wide range of speakers, which was the last flicker of the old London Freedom Group.

These were held at the Emily Davison Room. Frank Ridley spoke there on
occasion, the last time on the need to marry anarchism and Marxism, the subject
of which sparked off a debate in the ILP paper Controversy in which I
was vociferous and entirely negative. There were heated discussions among young
anarchists and radical socialists on what to do if war came. It was taken for
granted that complete dictatorship would clamp down immediately, yet at the same
time many were advocating conscientious objection as the only alternative to
“supporting the war”, which supposed a situation like WWI.

I was convinced, assuming one were allowed the choice of conscientious
objection even under the difficult conditions of WWI, that this had caused the
gradual isolation of the working class ideals from the working class. Yet to
enter the Army, when one knew the upper class was going to seize the officer
positions and was fascistic in the bargain, was equally intolerable. It was a
dilemma that was never resolved, and a price had to be paid for striving to
avoid either compromise.

Meantime the fragmentary groups of conscious anarchists in London got
together and formed the Anarchist Federation of Britain, in reality a group
declaring it would be the basis of what would be a national organisation, and
that it would publish a new paper, to be called Revolt! (early in 1939) under a
separate editorial committee. I was persuaded by Tom Brown, and Billy Campbell,
who was always pushing me forward on these matters, that I could hardly stand
aside, though I had sceptical reservations. The Anarchist Federation set-up
seemed to me a formula for isolation.

An editorial committee was elected, including Ralph Sturgess, Tom Brown,
Marie-Louise Berneri and Vernon Richards, who it was hoped could bring some of
the support Spain and the World had, though in reality this had
vanished. Its support had come from a wide range of groupings, many
conventionally anti-fascist rather than anarchist, some generally leftish and
even, in the case of the South African supporters, Trotskyist. I was co-opted to
help with circulation and wrote a few articles. Richards was elected treasurer
in default of anyone else. Sixty years later he still regarded himself as
treasurer-for-life and proprietor of the accumulated assets since 1886 by virtue
of this decision. Both Sturgess and Brown tried to bring the paper round to a
class struggle position but the paper only ran a few issues.

Tom Brown, though a Geordie by origin, was living with his wife and daughters
in Paddington and working in aircraft. Ray Nunn, Jack Mason and I would go round
to his flat to discuss how we could go ahead in the case of war. Tom had clear
ideas of getting into industry and organising there but younger people could not
do so. Ray was entirely for making a stand by conscientious objection and Jack,
who remarked jocularly that he would be certain to do well as his latest job was
engraving tombstones, was cheerfully all for what was shortly to be nicknamed
the debrouillard position. It was later translated generally to the more homely
‘skyver’, which implies more or less wangling one’s way through everything
somewhat in the manner the Good Soldier Svejk (the first, heavily cut,
translation was at last available). I never made up my mind what position to
adopt until a decision was forced on me.

Sturgess dropped out of activity with the collapse of the paper. Like a great
many others who had been very active in the movement, he felt then that it was
finished, and perhaps like a great many others in the working class movement,
was washed away with the pressures, not the passions, of war.

Yet our feelings of failure were not to be compared to others. I recall the
arguments I used to have with a young woman at work who worked in X-rays and who
resented my criticisms of the Communist Party. She insisted I must have a
personal reason for disliking Soviet Russia, but restrained her rage to a
muttered “Lies — all reckless lies”, the typical response of the bewildered
idealist. One morning I looked in her office and told her Molotov, for Stalin,
had just signed a treaty with Hitler. Had I known, it was not the most tactful
time to break the news. She had been on night shift, was tired, and had not
heard the radio. She flew into a temper and I retreated before her wrath with
unused X-ray plates flying at me. Later I thought she might have cooled down and
the news was in the papers anyway. I looked in her office to find her in floods
of tears. I guess many pop-frontists felt that way then.

One mature staff nurse at the North Middlesex was an old-fashioned Ulster
Tory. She had been a Queen Alexandra nurse in WWI and still dressed in the
starched collar tradition, completely defying the modern style introduced by the
radical (but boorish) Medical Superintendent, a very competent surgeon named
Ivor Lewis. They carried on a feud by giving contradictory instructions to the
younger nurses, complicated by the fact that, despite being a large overbearing
man, he seemed shy to face up to her, and she always spoke her mind outright.
However, she was my greatest ally in the place, partly because she liked to see
someone standing up to the management even for totally different reasons and
also because she too loathed the Franco regime. I suppose this was because of
its Catholicism. She even asked me if “my lot” wanted someone to train nurses
for the refugee camps in France. I don’t know how serious she was but I
introduced her to Emma Goldman and they clashed immediately.

One young doctor, very upper class, who had been tongue-lashed by her on
several occasions after hesitatingly reminding her of a new and unnecessary
ruling by Mr Lewis, found her amicably arguing with me, I suppose about Spain,
and he facetiously remarked, “I hope, staff, you’re not going to become another
anarchist.” She vehemently retorted “No, sir, I am a King and Country woman and
my service proves it — but I do detest damned smug complacent upper class young
English Conservative twits”. “I suppose that squashes me,” he remarked mildly.

I once got her to a meeting addressed by Jack White. She somewhat put White
out by saying afterwards she hadn’t entirely agreed with him, but she had served
in South Africa as a young nurse under his father General White so she knew his
heart must be in the right place. White had drilled Connolly’s Citizens Army,
and his activity in Spain would hardly have commended itself to his staunch
Imperialist father who had in the Boer War defended (or it may have been
relieved) Ladysmith, but he only smiled.

That must have been one of the last meetings held by the CNT-FAI committee.
It transformed itself into SIA (Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista), a
worldwide aid organisation for the refugees now flocking from Spain. However too
much of the CNT-FAI committee had centred on Emma Goldman, and as she went to
Canada that spring, it collapsed despite Ethel Mannin’s attempts to keep it
going. It was in a way quite a satisfying personal end to Emma’s last period of
life. In London she had been unknown, had desperately sought publicity but was
ignored by the press and public. In Canada, where the influential newspaper
publisher Pierre van Paassen had been an admirer, she got immediate press
publicity from the start. She was still known everywhere from her years in
America, which meant nothing in England.

Though she only spent a few months in Canada before her death the finale was
as she would have liked, She had daily press headlines, packed meetings, and a
new campaign (to save some Italian anarchists from deportation and certain death
— one of them I met over forty years later). She was finally allowed back into
the USA after her death and is buried at Waldheim Cemetery, Chicago, a
union-funded site of the graves of many anarchist pioneers in America. Renewed
personal interest in her came decades after her death, and the place where she
died is almost a radical women’s shrine. They built a monument to her near the
Chicago Anarchist Martyrs, though unfortunately the graves of leading Communist
Party apparatchiks like William Z. Foster are now all around.

Marie-Louise Berneri had the same force and energy, with a greater
theoretical grasp, as Emma Goldman. She had the same naive belief in “the
intellectuals” as Emma, but she had no illusions of her own personal “greatness”
and worked with the movement in a manner inconceivable to Emma, who had been
conditioned by the American lecture circuit’s star system. M.L. was always
prepared to come to meetings at factory gates or distribute literature in the
streets. After her death, Ethel Mannin, obviously thinking of the contrast with
Emma Goldman, whom she had also known, said there were many more prepared to die
for the revolution than to scrub floors for it. It was an unfortunate comparison
(thinking of Eleanor Rathbone) but I take the point intended.

The influx of Spanish political refugees, from immediately after the civil
war had ended until the world war began, meant there was plenty of metaphorical
and some literal floor-scrubbing to do. The great post-Franco exodus had begun,
It took years before the complete picture could be known (and only parts are
recorded). Elsewhere the treatment of the refugees was shameful. They were
herded into concentration camps in the South of France and later delivered to
the Nazis or to Franco unless their own resistance prevented the democratic
French government from doing so.

An irony was that the majority who went that way were Catalans escaping into
the part of Catalonia previously seized by France, and they were treated like
criminal invaders or at best, if released, as an alien rabble come to take the
bread out of the mouths of citizens. Having fought against tyranny and been told
they were the front line for democracy, so-called democracy put them behind
barbed wire on sandy beaches, with no sanitation and little provisions. Today,
those sandy beaches are pleasure resorts, and at the formerly notorious but now
delightful Saint-Cyprien-Plage one can now see a rare monument to the gallant
Spaniards, if in a manner that might lead the unwary visitor to suppose that
this was an atrocity of the invaders, or at least of the collaborationists.

Some families managed to escape, to live three families to a room (for which
they gave thanks); other males volunteered for the Foreign Legion to get
themselves or their families freed, some were subsequently returned to Franco by
force; some handed over to Hitler for forced labour or the concentration camp. A
sizeable number managed to break away during the war and were the first to
create the Maquis resistance. That was a springboard to the post-war Franco
resistance, with whom I later became well acquainted.

The Spanish Libertarian Movement (MLE), to use the term it used in exile to
cover and cover up the whole anarchist spectrum, was overwhelmed by the calamity
that had fallen on them. It was remarkable though, over the years how cohesive
they remained almost like a vast scattered family, although there were
considerable differences as to what had gone before and how to respond in the future.

In the main the Spanish movement was divided between those who had entered
the various government posts (the Ministries were only the tip of the iceberg)
in whose view the Allies had now taken up the anti-fascist struggle and at least
were better than the Communists, and those who had been actively in opposition
in the May Days of 1937 and after, and who determined somehow to go on fighting,
placing no hopes on any governments.

There were also a large number, especially with large families, who were
destroyed, if not physically so, by the whole tragedy and were fighting for
survival in exile, but who still remained loyal to their principles. Of those
who originally came to England most seemed to be in the third category.

Those who had been integrated into one bureaucracy now tried to integrate
into another, and soon found jobs with the BBC and so on. Those who were
struggling to survive got jobs in industry or joined the Army. They were luckier
than those in France, where people were still herded into concentration camps
right up to the German victory, when many were delivered over to Franco or the
Nazis. Others lived in abject poverty, some entering the Foreign Legion in
despair. Many of those who came to Britain formed a tight little ethnic
community until Franco died when in a mass exodus many went back, some as entire
families, and with British or French old age pensions one could live well in
Spain. Those who had stayed on and struggled lived in beggary after years of
prison, no pensions being paid to the defeated even when a socialist government
succeeded Franco.

Though the Spanish exiles presented no threat to internal stability until the
wave of international resistance in the sixties, and then only a handful, it was
natural that the secret police would like to keep an eye on them, if only
bearing in mind the reputation of Barcelona anarchism. Yet they had to go
carefully as most people on the Left still rightly suspected the Government of
being lenient to fascism and hostile to anti-fascism.

One of the people who took an immediate interest in the Spanish CNT refugees
was Sonia (Edelman) Clements, the daughter of John and Rachelle Edelmann,
American libertarians of the old school. Her interest may have been sincere
enough. She had worked with “Spain and the World”, lending her name at one time
as publisher, though she wasn’t. She was in the Labour Party and a friend of its
main strategist Herbert Morrison. She certainly clashed with Jack White and
others in the Anarcho-Syndicalist Union which led to its demise, and had a knack
of being able to get support in committee from people who otherwise took no part
in its activities, a tactic familiar in political parties. Her arguments were
all for involvement with the Labour Party or at least no criticism of it.

When Herbert Morrison later became Home Secretary, he had a highly evolved
technique of using people in key positions in political movements as his
informants. He used the technique for years successfully to defend the Labour
Party against Communist infiltration. After years of non-involvement with
anything but the Labour Party, Sonia Clements returned first to Spain and
the World and then to infiltrate the Spanish refugees. It so happened,
given the circumstances in London, they were clean from a security point of view
— only interested in the downfall of Franco who, though courted, was viewed as
a potential threat and was at that period openly anti-British. Her intervention,
therefore, was useful in this instance, which might have eased her conscience. A
different state of affairs was seen four years later when the role of Morrison’s
agent had uglier implications.

For the moment, the Spanish exiles enjoyed freedom from persecution in stark
contrast to the Italian exiles of twenty or more years standing. For years the
Italian anarchists had been noted as “Dangerous” by the police force of both
countries. However many years they were here, they were denied naturalisation
and always subject to surveillance. The fascists though loyal to Mussolini could
easily obtain naturalisation papers if they wished. When in the following year
Italy declared war, fascists went unscathed because of the prudent spate of
naturalisation in 1939 denied to anti-fascists. Consular officials went on
shopping sprees before returning home and wealthy restaurateurs were spared the
worst excesses of internment, though a few unnaturalised patriots were detained.
Anti-fascists, most of them anarchists, were bitterly hounded. No excuse of
anti-fascism sufficed. This was what Churchill meant when he said “Collar the
lot!” The victims and opponents of fascism suffered the humiliation of
internment and many were drowned on the “Arandora Star” — even the veteran Dr
Galasso, doyen of the resistance in Italy and indefatigable worker for the
under-privileged of Clerkenwell and Soho, particularly but not exclusively among
the Italian community.

War at Last

In September 1939, after twenty years’ talk of war, it finally broke out in
time for routine protests on a Sunday. Though everyone thought there would be
immediate bombing raids, large crowds gathered at Hyde Park to listen to the
empty bombast against it. Hyde Park was then still a serious political forum
though it had its comic turns, but these gave way to the passionate speakers
that day. As what they were saying was “Stop the war” the crowds listened
intently. The best speaker of all was Tony Turner of the then oratorically
active though tiny Socialist Party of Great Britain who spoke for some ten
hours, long after night fell, ignoring closing time. He outspoke everyone that
day, and in true SPGB style gave a history and analysis of capitalist economics.

It was a scene repeated in many other towns. There were occasional patriotic
cheering crowds but unlike World War I, they were few. The only result was that
at the end of the day the park keepers, or in other squares the police, herded
the reluctant crowds home, and they peacefully went to war. I’ve never thought
much of mass meetings since.

Within the first week I was at two smaller meetings. One was at Tom Brown’s
house where there was a gathering of some anarchists and sympathisers affected
or about to be affected by conscription. He personally was in a reserved
occupation, and I suppose over military age anyway. We determined on a plan to
show our opposition to war by registering as conscientious objectors, making as
defiant a statement of principles as possible, and then entering the armed
forces. This seemed the closest one could get to making a stand for one’s
principles without adopting the ultra-pacifist stand which meant very little,
isolating oneself from the workers.

The first of our circle who adopted it was Ralph Mills, who was
unconditionally exempted but medically rejected when he ‘volunteered’. The
second was Ray Nunn, unconditionally exempted and then volunteering, being
accepted in the army. He still got isolated from the forces, as he was promptly
made an officer, having been at an OCTU. George Plume, who was in the ILP, got
unconditionally exempted on purely ‘political’ grounds on the strength of his
unequivocal socialistic statement, but the Ministry appealed against the
decision, and he was deemed to have enlisted, so he went missing. I never quite
understood why: if it were a question of not wanting to join, he had only not to
take the medical.

In my case and that of several others, though we were not exempted, the
Ministry then refused to call us up nor was it possible to enlist for anyone who
wished to do so. Most waited for their calling up papers like the entire nation
did, but in my case it was not four days or four weeks but four years. I have no
idea how many were in this position but I was certainly not alone. For four
years of the war we were in this state of limbo. The Ministry of Labour was
actually calling on me to register for other forms of civilian labour, which I
declined, and when I spoke at meetings the police sometimes turned up and
demanded to see my identity card. When I produced it I left them baffled. This
was by no means unique. The Government was determined to “avoid the mistakes of
last time” and was content to let us stew in our own juice.

The other private, but in its small way historic, meeting was a private one,
again with Tom Brown, and M.L. Berneri, Vernon Richards and myself. We decided
to publish a bulletin, War Commentary, as Revolt! had
collapsed and we were all that remained of the production team. With the support
of Jack Mason, who obtained an accommodation address at Newbury Street and
designed the logo, we were off. By the second issue we were able to print it,
and for a few issues got articles from a number of people from the
anti-imperialist groupings more or less around the left of the ILP — Ethel
Mannin, Reg Reynolds, John Ballard, George Padmore, Dinah Stock. The rest
included Krishna Menon and Jomo Kenyatta, though they normally took a hostile
attitude to us, being already conscious of their coming destiny as world
statesmen, and clung to the Fenner Brockway line within the ILP.

During that winter M.L. Berneri and I organised a series of discussions on
the events of the Spanish Revolution, partly in Enfield and partly in Holborn,
to which some members of the Forward Movement Group of the Peace Pledge Union
came. The PPU was moving in various ways but the Forward Movement looked for
radical non-violent solutions. Indeed some of the Forward Movement had gone with
other COs to the Channel Islands, to spend the war in agricultural work, which
they thought of as opposing it. When the Germans invaded they joined the British
volunteers for the Nazi army, the Legion of St. George, which in its way was
non-violent enough as all it did was to strut around towns to show the German
workers there were actually soldiers in Nazi uniform with British shoulder straps.

Most in the Forward Movement were put off by this tactic of the PPU, at any
rate with hindsight, and followed John Hewetson, a medical doctor who came first
to our meetings and then into association with the anarchist movement. The guru
of the Forwards, Frederick Lohr, who was at heart a German Catholic Nationalist
though a pacifist of British nationality, and might well have followed the
Channel Islands lot, was by profession a horse trainer with a fairly upper-class
background (either by origin or his horsey interests). During the war he became
a copytaker at the Daily Telegraph. When I took the same job
twenty-five years later he was still remembered by old-timers for having come in
as a war-time substitute and then scabbed during a dispute.

Others included Lawrie Hislam, not distinguished for much other than throwing
tennis balls at No. 10 Downing Street as a protest against war, who endeavoured,
after John Hewetson went over to us, to get the whole Forward Movement to
declare themselves “anarchists” and thus began the infiltration of bourgeois
pacifism into anarchism, which altered the character of the movement and led to
its distortion for years. This is why Professor Woodcock (one of that
periphery), in the first edition of his Penguin Anarchism makes an
otherwise inexplicable reference to Hislam as having been the bridge between
“the old anarchism and the new”.

It soon became apparent to all working class anarchists that they were going
to be faced with a major influx of middle class pacifists, who had themselves
increased beyond measure. Though that class generally had become patriotic as
never before, bourgeois pacifism flourished, no doubt because of the changed
State attitude to conscientious objection.

There was a vast difference between the treatment of objectors to military
service in WWI and WWII. In the First World War many suffered, some even more
than if they’d joined the Army, being taken to the front and given No.1 Field
Punishment and even shot. In the second world war, anyone articulate and
knowledgeable enough to give a fluent case, preferably a Christian pacifist one
though they’d sometimes settle for a secular pacifist one, could get total
exemption, provided they didn’t make any slips ups. Christian cases sometimes
ended in conditional exemption if the appellant hadn’t done his homework.
Jehovah’s Witnesses only needed to produce a membership card.

There was more opposition to the State involved in joining the Army, and
trying to work for soldiers councils. The State saw that too, something we never
reckoned on. They were determined not to repeat the mistakes of the First World
War and were looking at the consequences of the end of the war more than they
were at the waging of the war. I followed our agreed procedure of signing on as
a CO and making a provocative statement they couldn’t possibly accept, but
hadn’t counted on the State then not doing anything about it.

I was sacked from the hospital for “industrial misconduct”, as they didn’t
believe I’d signed on, and the little industrial action group I’d built up
collapsed. They all, even my friend the staff nurse, thought I was being
victimised for the organising, which would have pleased me in a way, but it
wasn’t so. The Ministry of Labour declined to pay me any dole for six weeks
though I appealed against this and won. Their claim that I had not registered
was shown to be mistaken. I was hardly to blame, legally anyway, for their
inaction, which also puzzled the industrial tribunal. Many subsequent
experiences show that the British secret political police, if not the worst in
the world, are the most secret. The writer C. S. Lewis says the greatest success
of the Devil is to persuade people he doesn’t exist, which makes it easier to
get them to obey him. I never had any experience of this, but it certainly
applies to the secret political police. Perhaps Lewis was understandably
confusing the two.

For months I did not work at all and after a few weeks the Labour Exchange
stopped paying me. I mainly supported myself by my old trade, or racket,
whatever you wish, scribbling pieces of dialogue for variety people, whose
profession was booming as never before, but it seemed a terrible waste of energy
in 1940. Perhaps I should have tried serious writing, but it never appealed to
me as a profession. What I wrote otherwise I wrote from conviction not for cash.
Jack Mason thought I didn’t appreciate my luck, and Tom Brown urged me to take
advantage by holding meetings and writing the occasional political article.

The newly formed Anarchist Federation opened Freedom Bookshop in Red Lion
Passage: the editorial group of War Commentary had taken over the
distribution of Keell’s stock and called itself first Freedom Press
Distributors, and then Freedom Press. The Freedom Group was left reduced to
George Cores, too old and ill to do anything. In an unsuccessful attempt to
prevent the consequences of almost a mass “conversion” of the Forward Group, the
Anarchist Federation settled for a programme based on two parts: the first an
anarcho-syndicalist programme, and a second part, excluding both those who
supported the war and those who were pacifists. On this basis the Glasgow
Federation joined in.

The blitz came on while I was still idly lazing around Highgate Ponds. I was
a keen swimmer, and the Ponds seemed to attract the swimmers and the skyvers
both in war and peace. There I scribbled stupid bits of music hall dialogue, and
in the evenings, when other people weren’t working, I attended meetings. I
volunteered to help around the bookshop and did some unpaid work helping people
move after they were blitzed, but it was a frustrating period generally with
little I could or was allowed to relate to.

I discovered the unlisted headquarters of the Ministry of Labour by reading
my file upside down at the labour exchange and vented my frustration on them,
but all I could get out of them was a vague statement that they would let me do
agricultural work “as if you’d been conditionally exempted”, but that “as you’re
a red hot anarchist we’re not putting you in the army”. Or even, it seemed,
anywhere else, even where my presumed violent views were acceptable. Then
another official would some other time say that as I was liable to be called up
“any moment” they could not offer me a job but I was at liberty meanwhile to
find something temporary. Employers would then ask the labour exchange if I
could be employed and they would give the same answer, which hardly commended me
to anyone.

I had always taken Billy Campbell’s advice in these matters, but I had not
met him for some months during the first half of 1940. I had thought of the
merchant marine, about which I knew nothing. Meanwhile it seemed odd he had not
contacted me with a postcard from some port or other, but I assumed it might be
difficult. He had ambitious ideas of how seamen could be organised as they had
been in the past: and how the revolution that would, we firmly believed, follow
the war would be composed of soldiers’, seamens’ and workers’ councils. There
was now a blank. I wondered if he had been imprisoned by one or the other enemy,
and finally went to enquire at his mother’s house. It was an emotional meeting,
the first time I met her. He had been drowned when his ship was torpedoed.

That night a local boxing ring was short of a professional boxer. He had been
picked up that day for not answering his calling up papers, and I stepped in. It
was the only way I could give vent to my feelings. I was out of training,
hopelessly outclassed, and not much good anyway and received the biggest hiding
of my life. The manager was afraid he would be brought to book for letting an
amateur step in but the crowd adored it. Forty-odd years later when I was
working in print, an old Saturday casual came up to me and recalled how great I
was, which shows how much my beating up was enjoyed, rather than any ability. At
the time all I heard was a sarcastic remark from the crowd that if I was
medically fit enough to stand up to that sort of punishment, I was fit enough to
be in the Army, which was certainly true. But in the closing years of my working
life I heard every Saturday evening what a great career I had wantonly thrown away.

I had bruises for the next few months, and a ringing in my ears for the next
couple of decades, but I had no other way to express my grief. There was no
sexual attraction of which I was in any case ignorant, but I see my feelings in
retrospect as calf love with Rod Strong and Billy Campbell, none the less deep.
Both of them were invariably kind to me and at a period when everyone else, even
Special Branch which must have had full documentation, assumed me to be years
older than I was, treated me as protectively and affectionately as they would
have a kid brother. Wilson Campbell (he never liked using his forename — he was
born at the time of President Wilson’s bringing America into the war) was every
way an anarchist. I don’t just say this because he was a dear friend, but now
when people ask which anarchist influenced me most, Bakunin or Kropotkin or
whoever, I just don’t talk their language when I say Billy Campbell.

Internment and Discernment

After the fall of France new emergency regulations came into force, in
particular internment both of enemy aliens and suspect natives. Press stories of
“German soldiers dressed as nuns” who had been parachuted into Belgium were
meant to inflame the situation, though most of the people I ever spoke to
dismissed this with obscene mirth.

Italy came into the war despite the long Tory friendship and kinship with
Mussolini. Military Intelligence had for some time known local Fascist cells
were leaking military information through the Italian Embassy, via spy Tyler
Kent, but it was useful to them as a means of misleading the German Army. Now
the embassy was closed down, the Home Office was free to arrest Kent and order
the internment of fascist sympathisers likely to act as spies, under Regulation
18b. The Labour members were keen to get the British fascists.

On the weekend that the secret order was made law, enforcement chiefs
throughout the country, chief constables and sheriffs were warning fascist
gentlemen to join the army quickly to avoid detention, and there was an influx
of officers. Only people as notorious as Oswald Mosley could not avail
themselves of the chance to “rejoin their regiments” and were interned, some
like Mosley with their families under privileged conditions, though the ordinary
punters were unwarned and less lucky. Captain Ramsay (Conservative MP), having
privileged access to secret sessions of the House of Commons though believed to
be a Nazi agent, went into internment apparently to preserve his Parliamentary
status which prevented him from being excluded from debates.

We thought this must, judging by the Italian anarchist experience, herald a
clamp down on British anti-fascists as had happened in France. In fact only
Southend was affected this way. This was presumably considered a vital invasion
point of entry — close to London — and whether by orders from above or by
local police malice or ineptitude. All members of the local anarchist group were
arrested with the Independent Labour Party, many members of the Peace Pledge
Union, and a member of the IRA but no British or British-naturalised Italian
fascists, though there were a sizeable few of both in Southend.

The anti-fascist internees had a voluble spokesperson in the anarchist Matt
Kavanagh, who protested vigorously to the commandant at the internment centre at
their being lumped with fascists. They accepted imprisonent philosophically,
thinking this was a repetition of what happened in France, but that was adding
insult to injury. John Humphrey went to see Matt. A retired railwayman, John had
been the printer of Freedom, and his house at Malden Crescent, Camden
Town, was the HQ of the old London Freedom Group. His advanced age and benign
appearance must have made him seem to be harmless enough to let through. “I
can’t think why you’re here among the fascists,” he grumbled to Matt. “They
think I’m an enemy of the State.” he replied. “Well, so you are, and have been
these last forty years to my knowledge,” he said, correctly but, as there were
guards present, perhaps not too tactfully.

Afterwards he, Tom Brown, Fay Stewart (born Robertson) and I discussed
action. We thought there was nothing that could be done about imprisonment as
internment was under emergency legislation, and we would probably all eventually
go the same way.

What we thought we could do was to get a bit of logic into the situation by
persuading the authorities to separate the prisoners before there was major
trouble. There were already fights every day. Fay, who was a nurse, and had been
in my now disbanded group at the North Middlesex Hospital, had heard from a
fellow-nurse, a German Jewish refugee, that it was far worse in internment camps
for Germans, where Germans, Nazis, anti-Nazis and Jewish refugees alike, were
mixed together. Many elderly people were beaten up regularly. Some were asking
for separate internment camps and Humphrey came up with a brilliant if
simplistic idea: why not ask them to put British, Italian and German
anti-fascists together, and Nazis, Italian and British fascists together?
“They’d get on OK, it would be less trouble for the authorities, cost no more
and occupy only the same amount of space.” he argued. “And that way we’d help
our Italian comrades too.”

We had thought to approach George Strauss, who had helped Hilda Monte, now
also interned which was very humiliating for someone only wanting to go back to
Germany and kill Hitler. He couldn’t believe she wanted to get back to Germany
to kill Hitler, and declined to help further. So for Matt we decided to approach
Major Nathan, MP for Wandsworth, with this barmy idea, never believing it would
be taken seriously. But he was Fay’s local MP, she seemed respectable and he had
been sympathetic to a delegation about the fate of refugees deported to
Australian camps, according to the nurse working with Fay.

It was quite a lucky choice as Major Nathan just then happened to be one man
Churchill was depending on politically. The war cabinet needed Ernest Bevin as
Minister of Labour. Bevin was just the man to dragoon the workers into giving up
trade union rights they would never have surrendered to a Tory. All that was
needed was to find him a safe Labour seat in the Commons. Someone had to be
pushed upstairs to the Lords, and Major Nathan was prepared to undertake the necessity.

The Major was a leading figure on the Jewish community and chair of an
organisation concerned about the German Jewish refugees and our idea seemed
reasonable to him. Perhaps it seemed to him it was a small thing for him to ask
when he was about to make the supreme parliamentary sacrifice. It could hardly
be refused by the Home Office without appearing to be an offensive rebuff. They
could not know whose idea it was.

Tom Brown had said very logically, between ourselves, that they could not
possibly agree or it would make nonsense of the whole war propaganda to divide
internees into fascists and anti-fascists. It would probably give the latter the
worst end of it, but he agreed it might call into question the whole reason for
interning anti-fascists at all. What went on in Home Office circles I do not
know, but that weekend all the Southend anti-fascists were out, while the
fascists stayed in.

Matt, with his usual good humour, told us the IRA man, who had served a
conviction for bomb offences, had thought he alone of the anti-fascists would be
kept in among the fascists, so they had agreed to let him claim he was in their
anarchist group, deciding that alleged membership of the PPU or even ILP would
be stretching it too far. “That’s providing you don’t disgrace us to by going to
Mass in the meantime,” Matt had admonished jocularly. He answered, ruefully,
“We’re excommunicated anyway”.

It was a nice little victory, sweeter for being unexpected, though
unfortunately it did not help the Italian anti-fascists, who had nobody
influential to speak for them. Matt was unable to return to Southend, possibly
for economic reasons, and came to London where he worked as a barber, starting
at the age of sixty-odd. His gift of the gab impressed casual customer George
Orwell to write him up. Kavanagh had far more influence than Orwell in
convincing workers of Stateless socialism over the years, but “history” will
accept Orwell’s patronising, though not unkind, appraisal.

Having time on my hands I had spent some time looking after the bookshop in
Red Lion Passage we had started. It was burned down during the blitz and there
was no chance of getting down to industrial activity without a job. With
industry under such tight control, many forms of struggle became
counter-productive, and our sole activity was propagandist. Even Tom Brown, a
skilled engineer and a union-recognised shop steward, found himself in an
isolated position at work. The Glasgow Anarchists, who now joined with us in
forming the Anarchist Federation, were able to overcome this isolation which did
not exist on the Clyde.

Aldred became an embarrassment to them. He was then in the full flight of his
pacifist kick, supported by eccentric aristocrats and wholly disinterested in
industrial matters. Though he retained popularity in working-class localities
through his counselling it was not translated into political support or even
interest, and he made little impact on the anarchist influence in Glasgow
(except that they had to be always disowning his later antics) and none on the
places of work, which was a pity as he could have been an exceptional figure in
a British revolutionary movement.

I went up once or twice to speak. I never lost a fixed prejudice about
accepting fares or money, which was just as well, because I was never offered
any, and found it a strain in view of my economic situation. But I unexpectedly
got the chance to travel round the country with fares paid, by taking up
scriptwriting, advance publicity and secretarial duties to a music hall revue.
Many friends urged me to take it, though I am sure some of them thought I needed
to move around lest I be “picked up”. Even in our circles few understood the
situation, though there were dozens (to my personal knowledge, and, as I since
learned, hundreds) in the same position, some taking it more philosophically
than I did, though it was more common with those with International Brigade experience.

Though for Home Guard training some British veterans of the Spanish war were
recruited as instructors, and Spanish combatants were accepted in the Army,
there must have been some criterion as to who went where. Certainly, suspected
active support of the anti-fascist side seemed to mean exclusion from the forces.

Before an industrial tribunal which wanted to know why I declined their offer
of going into agriculture, I found a representative of some unnamed department
on the platform. I was told I did not have the right to challenge his identity
for “security reasons”! He made it clear I was not eligible for the forces for
reasons so secret that I was not even allowed to be told what they were, to the
surprise of the lay members of the tribunal and the total consternation of the
statutory trade union representative.

In view of this attitude it was at first sight apparently contradictory that
the Spanish refugees in Britain did not suffer discrimination, during the war at
least. Most males were allowed to stay unmolested providing they joined various
forces. Others could get jobs, including the BBC. I think this was due to the
fact that Sonia Clements had reported back to Morrison favourably. She had
gained their confidence and found that most of those in England believed there
might be intervention in the peninsula with the downfall of Franco, and they
were eager to participate. This belief that the British Government was
anti-fascist because its main enemy was fascist fooled a great many on the
Continent too.

Herbert Morrison had another plan up his sleeve too. He hated the Communist
Party for political and personal reasons. For years he had fought their
penetration of the Labour Party and built up an internal counter-infiltration
system. Early in the war he had banned the Daily Worker though after
Russia came into the war he could not continue to justify it. As a Coalition
Home Secretary of a country which unexpectedly came into alliance with Russia he
could hardly denounce the Communist Party for supporting the Allies, but he knew
that if left alone, the Trotskyists and the anarchists would certainly ridicule
this newfound flagwaving opponent of workers rights, and the fact that they
would puncture the Churchill myth possibly also gave him private pleasure, as
there was no love lost between the Prime Minister and his Home Secretary (later
described by Churchill as the Minister he was most glad to lose when the
Coalition broke up).

There was free speech for minorities, except for fascists, and then only
those actually interned, right until 1944, when it was expedient for the
anarchists and the Trots to be curbed and the fascists let out, despite
restrictions on the popular press. As a result the post-war Communist Party was
derisory. Though it emerged with strength in Europe because it could never be
exposed when it was most vulnerable, only their right-wing critics being vocal
at the time, here it was under ultra-left attack.

During 1941, though one could not say that support for the war, or at any
rate passive acceptance of it, lessened, the various dissident groupings
increased their strength. The Trots, more or less united for the first and last
time, made inroads into industry at the expense of the Communist Party. The
Communist Party, despite its accession in numerical strength because of its
flagwaving for Russia and identification with ‘Uncle Joe’, had become in effect
a right wing party. The Trots had taken up their former role in industry. It was
a major disaster for the Anarchist movement that they were only organising
industrially in Glasgow; though attempts were made in Kingston (London) to form
a syndicalist union of bus personnel.

We did however make considerable progress within the Armed Forces where many
for the first time found themselves up against the State in its elementary form.
The Communists, calling for the Second Front all the time, were naturally
unpopular among those who would have to be directly involved, however much the
overtime monarchs applauded them in production. The anarchists vied with Common
Wealth, a new party grouping, for popularity amongst soldiers. Common Wealth
supported the war but opposed the government: it was largely composed of
officers and NCOs inside the Forces, and middle class outside, who were taking
over from the Labour Party,. Bound as it was by the electoral truce, they
succeeded in making gains from Conservatives in seats which the Socialists were
not contesting.

The spreading of Anarchist propaganda through the lower ranks was a return to
working-class origins. Fay Stewart (as secretary), myself and several soldiers
and air force personnel brought out a bulletin Workers in Uniform and
we built up quite a network. Olday had meanwhile deserted, and became a regular
contributor both to War Commentary and Workers in Uniform.
Among those we contacted was one in the Free French forces, who later became
secretary of the French Anarchist Federation, and a couple in the Polish Army.
The majority were from towns all over Britain where the anarchist message had
not been heard for two decades.

I thought that at any time I would be called up and decided to make as many
contacts as I could while travelling around in the North with the music-hall
revue. I also had a more personal motive. I had always been too wrapped up in
political and industrial activity to have any sort of private life, not that
celibacy until the twenties was any rarity then. My first love was Rosalind
Shepherd. She was separated from her husband, who was living with another woman
on his leaves from the Army. As she was in a touring chorus and did not want to
give it up we did not set up a home, believing optimistically we would do so at
the end of the war.

Splitting the Atom

The Anarchist Federation, the second grouping to take the name, got off to a
good start in that it incorporated the Glasgow and London groups, and attracted
many smaller groups of industrial activists in different parts of the country,
took over War Commentary and appointed an editorial committee, which
was also responsible for Freedom Press (the ‘Distributors’ part had been
dropped), in no way then a separate group. The Glasgow end put its entire
backing behind the publishing venture. With difficulties in printing War
Commentary, financial in the case of the original printers C.A. Brock, and
political nervousness in the case of Narods, the next printer, a derelict press
in the East End of London (Express Printers) was purchased.

Such an asset (which increased with value over the years), was a double-edged
sword in view of the difficulties into which the movement ran as a result of its
increased support since once the British anarchist movement had assets it was
worth someone’s while getting hold of the property.

Meanwhile I was involved in a series of acrimonious exchanges with the
Ministry of Labour which felt it had the exclusive right to direct one to work
but wouldn’t do so. There was not much they could do in the event of my refusal
to co-operate since the normal alternative was sending people into the Army and
I decided, rightly or perversely, that was where I ought to be. I suppose I
ought to have just accepted the situation like a great many others did, Pat
Monks for instance, and they put it down to sinister motives or sheer
cussedness, both of which I suppose was true.

The faceless Ministry served me with a summons but when I told the
magistrates I preferred going into the services to going into some suggested
dead-end job in agriculture (to the discomfiture of our pacifist so-called
allies). Without explaining the political background, which the prosecution also
failed to do for its own reasons, they were sympathetic and gave me only a
nominal fine. The local press waxed indignant at the unfathomable ways of bureaucrats.

During the period when I was out of London there was a large intake of
membership in the Anarchist Federation, unfortunately an imbalance in that much
of it came from those we were guarding against, thinking that a constitution
barring pacifists would exclude them. What we were really trying to guard
against was a bourgeois ‘intellectual’ takeover. This failed in that people like
Fredrick Lohr, and in particular George Woodcock, came in, signing but ignoring
the constitution. Woodcock’s attitude was careerist, something not thought
possible. How could we provide or further a career? We had not reckoned how
valuable an asset a press was for an aspiring writer.

During that period of the war the activists of the anarchist movement were
steadily collecting arms, like many left groups, though there was a marked
difference with the pacifist elements that had come in under cover, especially
when the Independent Labour Party which had gathered them to its fold began to
blow hot and cold on the war issue. Fenner Brockway managed to unite the two
elements within the ILP, pacifist of Maxton and pro-war of C. A. Smith,
gradually losing the pacifists to an amorphous mish-mash of which we got some of
the spill while Common Wealth got others.

Common Wealth had a run of political luck during the war. The Communist Party
was totally outdoing the Conservatives in flagwaving and Churchill-praising
after Russia came in the war; the Labour Party was less uninhibited but being in
the Coalition bound to a war-time truce. In any by-elections Labour and
Conservative stood down, but Common Wealth stepped in with some success and
picked up the Labour vote. Everyone then thought it either a fluke or a great
surge for Common Wealth but it was simply the foreshadowing of a Labour victory
at the post-war General Election, when CW simply faded away, though with the
rump of the money it collected on its heyday it never completely disappeared.

The Trotskyists picked up the mantle of the Communist Party in industry, and
we hardly got a look in, partly due to the insidious middle-class pacifist
influence with which we had to contend. However, with the absurd ‘revolutionary
defeatist’ line preached though not practised, it was never popular in the armed
forces, where nobody was going to stick their neck out even by talking about it.
The Communist Party, especially after its turn-round to support the war and urge
a Second Front to aid Russia, was never popular in the Forces. Anarchist
influence made an impact on the forces, not only following possibly inevitable
lines of skyverism or the cult of the Good Soldier Svjek, but in actual
political context. In the surreptitious publication of Workers in
Uniform, at its height we had some four thousand circulation, which was
twice as high as the open publication War Commentary, published
nominally by Freedom Press but in fact the organ of the Anarchist Federation.
The actual existence of both the new AF and of WiU was kept a secret in case of
repression. This had organisationally disastrous consequences.

The interest in anarchist ideas seemed confined to the forces, and also to
the liberal pacifist elements that persisted in seeing them as relevant at least
to their temporary situation. Despite the efforts above all of Tom Brown, it
seemed impossible to reach the industrial workers, except in Glasgow where Frank
Leech made headway. There was certainly an element now nominally amongst us that
had no direct interest in reaching industrial workers.

I felt politically isolated and personally totally irrelevant, despite
speaking at numerous meetings everywhere and anywhere, from scattered meetings
of three and four to a thousand in Glasgow, and helping, despite some
fundamental political disagreements, to edit War Commentary.

Workwise I did various jobs around the theatre, and became a theatre shop
steward in the West End when Rozzie moved into town. The film extras, who once
had been grossly exploited, were, with the new demand for crowd scenes,
desperately sought. Even stagehands and house electricians, not to mention
servicemen on leave, were roped in. Leslie Howard was filming Pimpernel
Smith, an anti-Nazi film that did not follow the line of ‘victory’ but
‘revolution in Europe’ and the script called for ‘communist prisoners’. By the
time he came to make it, in 1940 the Russians had invaded Finland, and the
script was changed to ‘anarchist prisoners’.

Howard, who like most actor-directors was very testy, objected to the actor
scheduled to play the Nazi commandant. He complained that “he sounds like my
maiden aunt”, and having successfully replaced him, turned his attention to the
‘anarchists’. None of them seemed real, he said. The various hamming up of
stage-Anarchists failing, because the caricature had long since replaced
reality, someone suggested having real anarchists, to whom Howard couldn’t
object. It was mentioned to me and that was how I came to a minor film role as a
concentration camp inmate which many friends were playing for real at the same
time. Howard was intrigued as to what anarchism was, evident from other parts of
the script, as we seemed fairly normal to him. I do not know what he expected us
to be. He invited me to tea and he asked me why, if anarchism was supposed to be
about assassination, we hadn’t had a go at Hitler? I said it wasn’t, but we had.
All efforts had been frustrated, partly by finance and partly by police, and not
just Axis ones either. Howard, though the public thought of him as the
archetypal Establishment Englishman, was Hungarian by origin and passionately
anti-Nazi. He asked if he could help. I put him in touch with Hilda Monte and
the Birmingham people, and they suggested an international resistance group
located in Lisbon. It is hard to know what came of it though I know he managed
Hilda Monte’s attempt and persuaded Military Intelligence to let her get on with
it. I guess that if this was the case, they took the attitude that if a Jewess
was prepared to risk going back to Germany, and she was a spy, there was no risk
to them. I understood from Olday it was done through Portugal.

Later Howard was travelling from Lisbon in a civilian plane and was shot down
by German aircraft. The official story was that the slender, handsome film star
was mistaken for Winston Churchill. One can only assume the need for manpower
led Hitler to recruit deaf and blind agents in Portugal.

Blackpool Breezes

During 1941 to 1943 I was working in Blackpool for a while for a likeable
North Country comedian, Roy Barbour — the only employer I ever had with whom I
was friendly. He mentioned he had heard about my attempt at organising circus
hands, a piece of gossip which travelled far and wide in provincial show
business circles for its audacity and lost nothing in the telling. To my
surprise, he wasn’t hostile but wanted me to help him with tightening up the
local branch of the Variety Artistes’ Federation, though adding quickly it was
all in the name of helping others and there wasn’t anything extra in the pay
packet for doing it.

I never did get paid anything for speaking or organising bar problems so that
was all right, but the set-up I encountered was weird and wonderful. The Variety
Artistes Federation comprised the music hall profession, including stars and
others who, whether self employed, on the circuits or working in shows, were in
their own turn employers. They paid supporting actors, feeds, chorus girls,
property hands and so on. Even some of their employees, lesser acts or troupe
organisers, were employers too. It was born of the famous Music Hall strike when
the stars of the profession came out in support of the sweated, exploited and
underpaid members of the profession. But they had come to have a belief in the
magic properties of having a union without any clear notion of what it was
supposed to do.

In the course of time some of the lesser members of troupes were members of
Actors Equity, and there was a certain amount of rivalry between them. Coupled
to this was the fact that in the last boom of prosperity of the music hall,
agents and managers were making fabulous sums, and only the stars were keeping
up with the situation. It was certainly not clear at the meeting held at the
Central Pier, at which only the stars got up on the platform to speak while the
dancers and feeds held back shyly, what they were calling for except that
everyone had abuse for the agents and jokes about theatrical landladies. The
place sparkled with wit on the stage and beauty in the stalls, but had little substance.

I had a dazed feeling I was in a madhouse, especially when a popular local
comic, Dave Morris, suddenly turned to where I was trying to taking notes and
whipped them out off my hands, shouting “A spy from Moss Empires!” which brought
the house down, eclipsed when Ben Warriss explained “He’s taking minutes” and
his stage partner Jimmy Jewell responded “He’s taking bloody hours!”

As a result of the cross-business that went with the patter, I fell off the
rickety chair on which I was perched, to tremendous laughter. Billy Bennett
(“Almost a Gentleman”) remarked “None of this is rehearsed, you know”, a deadpan
remark which even to me sprawled on the floor sounded funny. Roy Barbour came in
with, “Why doesn’t he write these laughs in my scripts?” As Jewell and Warriss
were stage partners I am sure they had worked the gag out between them but the
pratfall was my own clumsiness.

Despite one serious speech by Wee Georgie Wood, the midget comedian who hated
his stage description and occupation, about how the stars of the old music hall
had supported the underpaid members during the Strike of thirty years before,
nothing was proposed or done for any underpaid members. Except one. To my
surprise, the comics who had used me as a foil made a collection among
themselves afterwards. Ben Warriss, who sadly ended in a theatrical retired home
supported by a charity he had sponsored, handed me an envelope, the only tip I
ever had and the only time I ever got paid for “union” activity. I did not open
it until afterwards, thinking it a letter of thanks, which it was but with what
amounted to about my month’s pay at the time. I might have refused the generous
gesture but for reasoning it was the laughs they were appreciating. I consoled
myself for waste of time and loss of dignity with the thought I could forever
after claim I had appeared on stage with the cream of the variety profession in
Blackpool, and possibly England, and got the biggest laugh of the morning.

When Rozzie’s tour came to an end in 1944 I returned to London. I thought I
would I wear down my secret blacklisters in the end by taking the army medical
in Preston instead of London, though they had the last laugh. (‘Twas ever thus?)
One day many months later some police officers came into a theatrical agent in
Regent Street (where I had arranged to meet Roz Shepherd) and asked me to step
outside. This was nothing new to me as frequently police officers had questioned
my being at liberty and it was amusing to confront and confound them.

Once in Doncaster, the local police chief, a war-time special named Thompson
who owned the theatre we were visiting, chortled with joy as he told my boss
(whose playbills he objected to having displayed around the neighbouring
villages for his following week’s visit to Leeds, thus possibly prejudicing that
week’s takings) that he had got a special message through to London and that
would be the end of his publicity campaign by eliminating me. However, whomever
he contacted presumably didn’t mind my going round placing adverts and
addressing small meetings so long as I was out of their way.

Naturally I assumed the Regent Street episode would be another such incident,
but to my surprise on this occasion they said that I had not responded to my
call up papers and was technically a deserter. What call up papers? I had just
spent the larger part of the war arguing about why I hadn’t had any; I had even
tried volunteering at one point to force their hand. The Ministry had been quite
adamant before the Tottenham magistrates that they had issued the requirement
for agricultural work because, for some reason they could not disclose in court
(I made great play of this) they could not call me up for service.

Now I was told this was incorrect, that they had in fact done so and I had
ignored the call-up! It was also alleged I had changed my address and not
notified the authorities. I had, it was true, been travelling around, but this
was permitted as long as one applied for the necessary ration book, which I had
always done. My home address had changed in that I was now living with Rozzie,
but my permanent address was still my parents’ house and no call up papers had
arrived there.

It was a trick such as I have never seen recorded, but which was played on a
number of people. To my knowledge alone, there were five others in similar
circumstances sentenced around the same time as me. Later I met dozens and heard
tell of hundreds. For ‘non-reporting’ I was sentenced, as a civilian, to
twenty-one days imprisonment. My possessions vanished. As Rozzie was away up
North, the police took some things and the landlady seized others. When I got
word through to my parents, they called on the landlady, who explained that she
had been afraid everything might have been stolen property, as the police had
taken some items, so being an honest woman (as she explained) she had sold the rest!

Prison

Brixton prison had been transformed into a centre point for 18B (mostly
fascist) detainees earlier in the war, but the growing prison population had
obliged the authorities to remove these to the Isle of Man, the woman’s prison
at Holloway and some council estates in the North, and restore Brixton to
criminals like me. I had been taken from a theatrical agent’s office to Bow
Street magistrates court and sentenced to six weeks imprisonment on a charge I
have yet to understand. I was said not to have notified my change of address for
six weeks. But my permanent address was the same as it had always been, and my
absences had been for regular periods of a few weeks only for four years.
Naturally I smelt a rat, indeed several, with pinstriped suits, bowler hats and umbrellas.

I met one or two coster acquaintances from the boxing fraternity who were
petty thieves. They looked at my joining them in jail with flattering disbelief,
feeling I and others like me justified their own predicament. There were several
other prisoners of blameless lives and of whom one might have thought any
country would be proud. One or two were in my position, having been prevented
from joining the armed forces for years, but were now told papers had been
served on them, of which they knew nothing. It made me realise it was a
deliberate Ministry of Labour ploy introduced around that time. Granted some of
these might have received and not responded to their calling up papers, but it
seemed odd that in very few cases had they changed their addresses even
nominally. Two had been arrested at their own breakfast tables.

Prisoners included not only politicals but people who had fallen foul of
innumerable regulations especially in industry, and a few in the Services, as
some commanding officers seemed to let offenders go to the civil courts and so
serve sentences in civil clothes, rather than have their regiments represented
in Army jails.

There were also a few conscientious objectors, though nothing like as many as
in the First World War. These had not been exempted by legal tribunals. Most
articulate persons could pass their tribunals if not the first time, in which
case they got a year’s imprisonment, then at least the second time. Few got back
for a third term, though there were two I met, inarticulate and scarcely
literate who had gone back to jail again and again from barracks, though
unquestionably genuine in their pacifism, for the crime of not being able to
express their ideas in court.

All the spivs, black marketeers and burglars I met seemed to think the
non-criminal element raised their tone. On one occasion a warder was shouting
out “You’re thick, the lot of you — born stupid!” because some order had not
been obeyed. I was standing at the back with a peace-time schoolmaster sentenced
to six weeks jail for taking a week’s unofficial paternity leave from an
engineering factory, a job he hated, as he was trying to get in the forces. All
eyes turned to us, there were grins on every face, and the screw actually blushed.

With being regarded as a scholar, at least among the illiterate, and being
accepted as ‘one of us’ being supposed to having been in the fight game (which
was exaggerated by my pugilist friends), I spent almost the entire twenty-one
days writing letters and petitions for people, and tended to enjoy the stay.
Olday was in another wing: he was depressed and in virtual isolation, writing
despairingly of conditions, even of torture, to mutual friends outside. This
contrasted with my cheerful remarks not unnaturally baffled them, especially
when he wrote to say somebody had told him how well I had stuck out a terrible
beating-up. This referred to my last fight, long before the prison fortnight,
but he misinterpreted it.

He had been arrested before me, for carrying a portable typewriter in the
blackout, which was regarded as suspicious. Taken to the police station, he was
found to have a identity card someone had lost, though the owner of the
typewriter came forward to explain he had lent it to him and it was quite
legitimate. As he refused to speak in court about the identity card he went from
one court to another. By the time he reached the Old Bailey in 1944, they knew
his identity but as he was still silent he got a huge sentence, in years instead
of months, for this minor offence.

There was one little tailor in jail who had been sentenced for some trade
offence or other, who was quite bewildered at what had happened to him. He had
however learned the warders received (I forget the exact amount) maybe fifty
shillings a week. It shocked him. As the warders shouted and raged at him, or
anyone else, he muttered to himself, or to anyone standing nearby, “Tt-tt, to be
such a bastard for fifty shillings.” By the time I came to leave, he had merely
to shrug his shoulders and mutter “For fifty shillings, I ask you” to make it
known that he, or someone, was in trouble again.

Six weeks went and I was supposed to be released. I was detained in a
communal cell ‘awaiting escort’. “Your unit is coming to pick you up,” explained
a warder. There was a slight hitch because there were several escorts turning up
and they asked me, I suppose from the prison point of view not unreasonably,
which my unit was. Unit? I did not even know which regiment. They could not
believe it. “How can you desert from a unit and not even know which one?” I was
asked. I replied that it seemed evident one could.

One warder explained, thinking me stupid, that if I hadn’t reported for duty,
the unit would be the one mentioned on the calling-up papers. What calling up
papers? They accused me of being deliberately obstructive but when it transpired
there were several in the same predicament and several escorts waiting to take
prisoners to differing destinations, they saw the light. There was a lot of
frantic telephoning before we were all sorted out and taken to our respective
railway stations, some of which happened to be the wrong ones though not in my case.

It was a stroke of luck that the corporal in charge of the escort knew me by
repute. He had a friend who received Workers in Uniform though he was not
himself in agreement. We spent the seemingly interminable train journey to North
Wales by an ever-halting train amicably arguing. He took the cuffs off me and at
a couple of stops sent the other soldier with him to bring coffee and
sandwiches. He was a bit shaken by the way I had been treated and quite
unnecessarily apologised for whatever part I might suppose he had to play in it.
Orders, he explained apologetically, but it was before the Nazi trials made this
a cliche.

The corporal was on compassionate posting in Prestatyn, but the private, a
Liverpool Irishman, was from the Pioneer Corps located there, into which I was
deemed enlisted. The camp itself was ‘a bit cushy’, he told me — nobody gave a
damn about anything, though it was run by a mad colonel, Greenwood, who was
supposed to have the VC. The joke went it must have been for learning how to
run. He was anti-Irish and was supposed to have served in the Troubles. It was
best not to run up against him, particularly for Irish soldiers. When the
private had been on a charge the colonel asked his name, and when he replied it
was Flanagan, was told that was a black mark from the start.

The Pioneers did not have the military ‘cream’ of the Irish like the Irish
Fusiliers but Colonel Greenwood was a curious choice as commanding officer for a
unit which had something like thirty per cent Irish and fifty per cent Liverpool
or Glasgow Irish.

The Pioneers had originally been intended as a labour corps and possibly a
non-combatant one. It had then become a fighting unit but with non-combatant and
labour units attached. There were German and Spanish refugee units from which
people had moved into fighting units. There was also an attached corps for
conditionally registered conscientious objectors. Then some time in the war it
had been transformed into a fighting unit but with people deemed of lower
physical or supposedly mental (in fact, educational) capacity. This made
membership of the Pioneer Corps a ‘disgrace’. Men who didn’t feel any resentment
at the fact of an officer class felt embittered at being not considered good
enough even for the infantry.

This attitude was seized on by the Army and when officers despaired of
handing out punishments to recalcitrants or did not wish to have the slur of
recalcitrancy on the good name of their regiment, they transferred offenders to
the Pioneer Corps using it as an oubliette. By the time I arrived it was a
disciplinary regiment on the lines of those reported in the French Army in
1939/40, but different in application.

The British ruling class differs from the French or German. The offspring of
the French ruling class got transferred to units far from the battle, and the
crack German soldiers swaggered round Prague showing their uniforms while the
politicals and criminals were sent to the front. It was not a good idea
tactically as the front not unnaturally collapsed when it was expedient to do
so. The British ruling class, brought up in the public school tradition, thought
dying for their country an honour, and dashed over the lines shouting “Follow
me”. Now and again nobody did. It wasn’t unknown for the occasional unpopular
one to be shot from behind. The disciplinary units were kept away from combat,
deprived of the chance to die for the empire until a last desperate stand was needed.

It was these attitudes that caused the exodus from county regiments to the
Pioneer Corps, and embittered regular officers like Colonel Greenwood were given
a ragbag assortment of officers who had been Army bandsmen, civilian policemen
or talented refugees from various countries, all commissioned to meet a need. He
took his disappointment out on the Irish. He wasn’t too fond of Scots either,
not liking anyone much, but he had the whole camp at Prestatyn wakened with a
Highlands piper every morning at dawn. Someone said it was an excuse to make a
regular sarcastic remark to his orderly officer, an Austrian Jew, in front of
the assembled troop, of how it should stir his Highland blood.

I should add as a note that the Pioneer Corps had a happy ending from a
military point of view, after it had fulfilled its latter-day role as a penal
battalion while conscription lasted. In peace-time and after conscription ended,
under its new title of Royal Pioneer Corps no less, it changed its image and
became a normal service corps.

Division

During 1944, prior to my arrest, there had been a clamping down on the whole
extra-parliamentary opposition, which had been tolerated even during the
blackest days of the war. One could see the hand of Herbert Morrison. The
anarchists and Trotskyists had played their part in weakening the Stalinists and
so helped make the British Communist Party a negligible force in the post-war
period, which incidentally helped the Labour Party politically. It also weakened
the Tories. At the Election of 1945, the C.P. was to be their unlikely ally,
supporting Churchill for Prime Minister, but of a Labour Government. The CP then
won only two Parliamentary seats, a Scottish miners seat they’d had for years
(which 25 years before had been an anarchist stronghold), the other a temporary
hold on a vanishing seat in Whitechapel Mile End. The only other place they
might have had credibility was Morrison’s own seat in Hackney, which he
prudently swapped in time for Lewisham, which had lost its former middle-class status.

So in 1944 the government proceeded to attack both anarchists and Trotskyists
without much resistance. Both were first weakened by what appeared to be
internal dissent engineered by Labour Party moles. The divisions had to be
there, of course, but they were accentuated so far as the anarchists were
concerned by Woodcock’s literary clique and partly by Sonia Clements’ machinations.

The Anarchist Federation as then constituted was anarcho-syndicalist and
endeavoured to exclude pacifists, supporters of the war, and non-syndicalists,
though this did not always work out. But there was by now a major difference as
to what Anarchism was all about. Either it was a marble effigy of utopian
ideals, to be admired and defined and even lived up to by some chosen
individuals within the framework of a repressive society, or it was a fighting
creed with a programme for breaking down repression.

Berneri and Hewetson seemed to take the first point of view but as they were
activists in their own way it could be passed over as a mild difference. But the
crux came when Woodcock, admired by them as an aspiring intellectual, wanted to
use Read’s influence and the movement’s assets to build his own literary clique
by means of a magazine (Now). At least one of the people he referred to
as a libertarian was in fact a Trotskyist (Julian Symons), and at least one
other (Adam de Hegedus) even some sort of fascist, but all of them were on the
make in literary terms and their politics nebulous. Tom Brown wanted the press
used for its proper purpose, industrial agitation. There was no doubt as to the
press being a collective one, belonging to the Federation, but Berneri, Hewetson
and others working on it full time though voluntarily, had effective control,
Richards had the accumulated assets in his name and they created a new grouping
calling it the Freedom Press Group, saying they had not taken over the press by
doing so.

Brown and one or two others had a scuffle with them, amusingly exaggerated in
some subsequent books, but were outflanked in the actual manoeuvres, and
Richards took over. He had a small group around him, and they soon claimed they
were not just the new Freedom Press Group but the old Freedom Press itself.

Brown’s group accepting Sonia Clements, whom many realised was a mole, caused
a division with most anarchists, though it got them the support of the group of
Spanish exiles not into Resistance, with whom she was associated. Brown was
unquestionably right on his analysis of the situation, and proven so by
subsequent events. War Commentary had been re-named “Freedom”,
though it was specifically said this was not the old Freedom. Within a
few months of their taking over, totally unconstitutionally, and denying they
were doing so, they were speaking as if they were the same people who owned the
same paper ever since 1886.

As the official clampdown came more or less at the same time, and many in the
old movement were facing one sort of harassment or another, the argument raged
only between a couple of dozen people in London, and its conclusion became a
fait accompli. What prejudiced most anarchists was the totally coincidental
factor that the scuffle (in some accounts published since greatly magnified,
especially by Woodcock, who even suggests the IRA was involved!) happened at the
same time that the police were about to prosecute for sedition.

The police had already raided Fay Stewart’s flat for Workers in
Uniform. Her dog bit a policeman who had come in through the window, and
while she was bandaging him she slipped the address list in the fire. A few
months later she was killed cycling home in the black-out. There is no way one
can say it was not accidental, especially as her death was known at the time
only to her own family, who had no reason to suspect otherwise.

The police then raided War Commentary going through its files for
the whole of the wars, saying it showed it was calling on soldiers to lay down
their arms, though this was nowhere stated and many articles in War
Commentary, which was not a pacifist paper, would have shown clearly this
was not exactly Anarchism. Perhaps picking up their arms and using them
appropriately would have been much more abhorrent.

As named proprietors Richards, Hewetson and Berneri were charged with
conspiracy, though they had not written the articles under complaint, as was
Philip Sansom who happened to be in the office when the police called. As the
law then stood, Berneri was acquitted when the case came on in 1945, because a
husband could not conspire with his own wife. The others received two years.
Woodcock, for whose sake they had made themselves registered proprietors,
announced publicly that while he was not concerned and did not agree with them
he would defend to the death, etc.

The prosecution, which everyone thought would have produced more drastic
sentences, undoubtedly deterred others from pointing out that these were not the
proprietors, only two were editors, and the main responsibility was collective.
The argument “why go forward and be a martyr, you only add one more hostage” was
made by many, including those charged.

We thought the time had come to go underground, but after the trial
everything proceeded as before, with the same type of article and the same type
of activity. It happened with the Trots too, to the indignation only of the
Communist Party.

Military detention

It was naive of me to think that having been ‘deemed enlisted’, and served a
sentence for not knowing it, that would be the end of harassment. They had gone
to some pains to get me in even if I had been neglected so long. Other people
‘deemed enlisted’ at the same time as me went straight into training. I was to
be court-martialled for desertion, after being taken from prison having been
convicted of the offence of neglecting to notify change of address, which only a
civilian could commit.

At a preliminary interview to the court martial, I was told the prison
sentence should never have been imposed, but that was no concern of theirs.
Fortunately I was able to convince them that not only had I never served in the
Army and been excluded by mysterious command, but would be able to demonstrate
that at the time of the alleged serving of call-up papers by the Ministry of
Labour, they were prosecuting me for declining agricultural work. The officer
briefed to prosecute me said ruefully, “If that’s so, there’s no desertion case
for you to answer” which proved to be the case. They therefore switched the
charge to absence without leave, which was equally absurd.

The less than impartial court-martial had an anonymous observer to whom the
court martial judge, Captain Le Strange, held I had no right to object and to
whom I otherwise would not have known there was a clear objection. The judge
then explained carefully to me, before hearing a word of evidence, how important
it was to make an example of someone like myself who might give a lead to
others. He proceeded to dismiss my evidence as irrelevant and awarded me two
years imprisonment for absence without leave, exactly the same sentence they
were handing out for desertion.

It may be remarked in parenthesis that there was a marked contrast between
the punishments handed out in World War One and those in the Second World War
and immediately after. Undoubtedly the Labour Party influence was responsible.
Death sentences were no longer freely handed out as in the Reign of Terror run
by the military in 1914-18 and subsequently. The Labourites might want to
preserve conscription to boost their egos, but they had less blood lust than the
old Liberal-Tory coalition in the first war. At the front five minutes absence
meant the firing squad in WWI but never, I think, in WWII. Three years for
desertion or whatever was given or off the field two years imprisonment, and
sometimes that got suspended after a few months. Perhaps that is why civil
servants felt free to engage in artful political connivance.

I was taken from Prestatyn (a converted Butlin’s holiday camp) with a chained
gang of prisoners to Stakehill military detention camp, which then had the most
notorious reputation in England. I confess to being despondent, especially when
we changed trains at Bradford and I saw a playbill for Rozzie’s troupe playing
locally, but felt I had to keep spirits up. When the sergeant in charge of the
convoy asked me how I managed to get in the situation in which I found myself, I
answered “Easily enough”.

Stakehill had hit the news because a prisoner had been found dead. The Church
of England chaplain is usually in such circumstances a minor administration
official but in this particular case an enthusiastic young parson objected to
the guards declining to take their peaked hats off when escorting prisoners in
church. Without their cheesecutter hats they had a human-like appearance and
they weren’t going to take them off out of misguided respect for the divine presence.

He had protested but to no avail. Then one day he was down in the detention
cells and heard cries. He rushed in to find that two warders had just hit a man
who was lying on the floor. One of them was saying to the other, with heavy sick
sarcasm.,”Kick him staff, he’s still breathing”. When the horrified padre asked
what had happened, the other staff sergeant said, with an equal heavy attempt at
jocularity, “Don’t mind him, sir, he’s always lying on the floor crying.”

Unfortunately the man had hit his head when falling and was dead, and the
staff sergeant was a Welsh Calvinist and not to the liking of a High Churchman.
The story unfolded at the subsequent enquiry, when the chaplain told of the
terrible death of “a man to whom I only that Sunday given Holy Communion”. The
country, which had just been given the facts about Belsen and Buchenwald,
compared it to them. One accidental death in six years, even if during rough
handling, was hardly the same but Stakehill acquired a dreadful reputation
because of a sick joke taken at face value. Even one of the incoming prisoners
who had served time at HMP Dartmoor said he dreaded it.

Once inside we found it seething with incipient mutiny and the officers and
staff were doing their best to mollify everyone. It is strange to reflect that
all the boon companions I met in that converted mill were regarded as convicted
criminals. Stakehill was called a detention barracks camp rather than a military
prison. Shepton Mallet qualified for that description though it never got a
quarter the notoriety of Stakehill. But prison it was. There may have been a few
there guilty of crimes against society, but not many, as these went to civil
jails. The overwhelming majority were a credit to the nation, though the State
treated them as a debit. These were fine people who could have been, and many
who had been or subsequently were, useful to the community. Yet for some minor
infraction of absurdly imposed regulations or breach of discipline, and
sometimes not even as much, we were kept in cages. It was Brixton Gaol all over
again but more so.

I was treated with immense kindness by fellow prisoners, or soldiers under
sentence, as the preferred phrase was. There was a general belief I had been
treated shabbily though I don’t suppose I had been treated worse than anyone
else. It was from a personal point of view a considerable downgrading when,
after Christmas (needless to say celebrated in captivity) the establishment was
closed down and everyone transferred. I went to Sowerby Bridge, a hell in
comparison to the much-maligned Stakehill, though it is conceivable Stakehill
had been as bad before the tragedy. It was on my birthday that January
(listening to different ‘cases’) I determined some day I would do whatever lay
in my power to help political prisoners and those unjustly or unfairly
convicted. I hope I kept that promise.

The staff at Sowerby Bridge had been told that the incoming prisoners from
Stakehill were near mutiny. They were told we had been pampered and needed to be
treated with brutality. The truth is at no time would there have been actual
mutiny. It needed only a few rumoured buzzwords like ‘Amnesty by Christmas’,
such as visiting VIPs liked to spread, plus a few ‘suspended sentences’ with
soldiers released and returned to their units or even discharged, to restore
normality. and quell incipient riots.

There was more dismay among some soldiers to find they’d been released but
transferred to the ‘chunkies’ — the Pioneer Corps — than among those staying
on in their third year of captivity.

Pack drill ‘at the double’ was the norm at Sowerby Bridge, though this form
of punishment did not go as far as it did in most countries, and in the British
Army too in previous (and I suppose later) years. If one simply declined to go
‘on the double’ there was nothing whatever the staff did or could do. There were
insults, but few if any beatings up. Occasionally people became violent under
persistent insults and assaulted a guard, and were knocked down by a few staff
ganging together; even so the guards were very careful after the Stakehill incident.

In the main the people prepared to ‘skive’ and not go on the double were in
the Pioneer Corps already, or did not mind being transferred to it on release,
whereas the others were under psychological pressure to show they were good
soldiers. There were exceptions, such as a few old soldiers (some who had WWI
experience) or some who felt they were on the way out. But some had been in the
army for years and lost the benefits of their past service, whether pensions or
discharge money, for some drunken spree, and were hoping to regain it by good behaviour.

One RAF ground staff prisoner from the British West Indies, was persistently
racially insulted by the staff and unused to such taunts as he might have been
today. At that time Afro-Caribbean troops were popular among the public and
their arrival in Britain from the boats greeted with huge applause. He went
berserk under the verbal pressure and was taken to the punishment cells, where
we could hear his roars of pain. There were shouts of protest that could not be
quelled from every one of the mass cages, and had the warders dared to unlock
the doors for parades outside there would possibly have been mass mutiny.
Afterwards things did ease a little. I did not see the Jamaican again but was
told he had been transferred.

On one occasion Marie Louise Berneri was visiting some Spanish soldiers
stationed nearby, and came to Sowerby Bridge to see me and John Olday. Visitors
were absolutely forbidden. But she was allowed in, partly because the commanding
officer was intrigued at the situation. Here was a beautiful foreigner calling
in casually asking to see two entirely different prisoners, neither of them
related! He detected a spy drama, and picked up the word ‘anarchist’. God knows
what it meant to him.

To my surprise I was ushered in to a pleasant chat with her, but surrounded
by screws, one or two even carrying sidearms. One shorthand writer, trying to
look inconspicuous, was frantically trying to keep up with us while the others
were trying to understand the plot; or at least the jargon. At one point she was
politely asked “keep the conversation in English, please”, having used some
undoubtedly French word like ‘bourgeois’ and there was no interpreter available.

Meanwhile Olday, who had been plucked from a different cage, was outside
waiting his turn under an equally formidable guard, and having seen me go in,
was wondering just what was going on. The only phrase dropped in his earshot was
an ominous ‘attempted international anarchist intervention’.

This proved to be the only social visit I had. When I applied for
compassionate leave on hearing from Rozzie that she was to have a child, it was
greeted with derision, though as we weren’t married it probably would have been
rejected anyway. Eventually an entirely unexpected situation brought about my
release after some fourteen months. I had persuaded a lot of my colleagues that
we should make common cause with the Jamaican RAF personnel, pointing out that
when the staff got away with insulting them, they felt safer in abusing us.

I did not feel myself making much headway until one day, a staff sergeant
shouted on a strenuous parade, “Okay, the two coons fall out and let me see how
the rest of you manage”, particularly uncalled for as the problem was that the
two West Indian aircraftsmen were doing the drill well, and the purpose of
having them fall out was to correct the others. Quite spontaneously, sixty out
of seventy Whites fell out. The staff was livid, and (though I wasn’t present)
one of the informers, of whom there were always a few, claimed afterwards it was
due to my urging as indeed I hope it was.

I was being accused of planning mutiny before I even knew what had happened,
and the unexpected punishment was that I was put on the next batch of suspended
sentences, and out of the place within twenty-four hours.

It was so sudden that I was taken to a King’s Royal Rifle Corps depot and
told I was to accompany their unit to Greece, which as it was in revolutionary
turmoil at the time seemed inconsistent, though I didn’t object. The commandant
seemed determined to get me out of the country come what may. I had no time to
get kit, not even a cap, and did the journey in a steel helmet and what I stood
up in.

Once again I was lucky in that the KRRC corporal escorting me to the Dover
Castle asked permission of the young officer to let me off handcuffs, and
enabled me to phone home and arrange for my parents to meet me on the platform
when we changed trains at London. They gave me some cash, which I lived on for
the next three weeks. When we stopped over in Dover others on sentences, only
suspended once at sea, arrived in handcuffs and were locked up for the night.
They had no money and no pay day for three weeks. I however could go out for a
drink with the KRRC. Once again I had found a friendly corporal who said to me,
“I don’t know how you got into detention with such nice parents”, thinking of
it, as some do of prison, as the result of neglected upbringing.